


Bring Your Angel to School Day

by softlyinthestreetlights



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-10 08:10:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyinthestreetlights/pseuds/softlyinthestreetlights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Dean's age he knows that lots of kids have guardian angels, but he's never met his. And for the most part he's okay with that. He has other things to do while he waits, like take of Sammy and hug Mom when she's sad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dean liked school. His mom always packed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the bread that he always picked out from their trip to the grocery store and a box of apple juice. His teacher, Ms. Cummins was a very nice lady. She let the kids who finished their work early comb her hair, because that’s what they liked to do and Dean thought she had very nice hair. It was blonde like his mom’s. He was good at math, and the inside of all his workbooks had lots of stickers, just so he could show his dad and get a ruffle on the head. Well, every one except Science, cause Science was icky. And after school he and mom would stop over at the day care and pick up Sammy, who always smelled like little kid and animal crackers. They’d load up into the car and he’d clip Sammy’s seatbelt because Dad had given him that job and he was very proud of it.

By his age Dean also knew that a lot of kids had guardian angels, but he’d never met his. Sam had met Gabriel last summer. He’d tried so hard not to cry because he didn’t want Sam to see, but Mom and Dad had just been so happy that Sam had gotten a guardian angel that he’d just started bawling. Mom hadn’t let him get very far before picking him up and rubbing his back until he’d calmed down. Mom was good at that. So when Ms. Cummins asked the class what they thought about ‘Bring Your Angel to School Day’ he was the only one who didn’t raise their hand. Maybe he didn’t even have an angel.

Bring your angel to school day was set for the Friday after the weekend, but words like weekend were stupid. The week never really ended. So Ms. Cummins had let him use her giant desk calendar to count the days instead. So when Mom picked him up from school that day it was the first thing he told her.

“Hey Mom, guess what?”  
Mom laughed and held out her hand so he could grab it as they crossed the street, “What, Dean?”

“No Mom! You have to guess!”

“Did you get a new sticker?”

“Yeah Mom, I got two.” He braced his legs together and took a leap up onto the curb. “But that’s not it.”

“Well what then?”

“In 9 days instead of Show and Tell it’ll be “Bring Your Angel to School’ day.”

He looked up from trying not to step on cracks in the sidewalk to see what his mom thought but she was standing in front of the sun. “Wow… that’s great Dean. You’ll get to meet a lot of new angels, huh?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna be great. Maybe Gabe will show up.” Gabriel showed up at the Winchester doorstep every Thursday afternoon to pick up Sammy. Dean never went with them, but he was sure they went lots of great places. Like the park he liked to go to, and maybe even the store downtown that sold model cars and what his Uncle Bobby called ‘gizmos’.

Having an angel must be a lot of fun.

\--_

That night Mom and Dad started ‘loud talking’. Dean could hear them from up in Sam’s room where they were playing Cars; even over the heavy rain outside. Dean’s was winning and he was just about to cross their make-shift finish line when there was a crack of lightning and thunder outside. Sam started crying again, he was so scared of storms it was ridiculous.

But Sammy was his job. So he stopped, his car mere inches from winning the race and got up to close the curtains and get Sam’s plush elk, dubbed Padamoose, and went over to where Sam was sitting, legs drawn up to his chest and eyes red around the edges trying not to cry.

Downstairs there was another outburst and the front door slammed. Another flash of lightning followed by another, louder, clap of thunder. It was okay, it really was. It was all going to be okay. People at school always made each other apologize after fights and then people liked each other again. Maybe it just took a little while longer for grown-ups. The sound of a car disappearing from the driveway and bumping the curb that Dad always hit when his breath smelled funny came from outside. It was all quiet downstairs, maybe both of them had left.

He stood up again, with Sam close behind him. Downstairs Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with her head between her hands. She looked smallish, like the girl he’d pushed down at recess once. It had been an accident. But her knee was scraped up and it didn’t look very nice, because people weren’t _supposed_ to have their knees scraped up and she’d cried. But when recess was over she had a band-aid that she liked, it was this blue color like his chalk and it had carrots on it. She told him later that she wanted to be a chef. He told her that he hoped she didn’t use carrots. She frowned at him and walked away.

But Mom’s knee wasn’t scraped up. So it must be her feelings that were hurt. Feelings were harder to fix than knees, but not that much. 

“Mom?”

“Mom flinched when he tried to hug her, so he didn’t, but Sam went and sat down on her foot and hugged her ankle. It was then that he saw that she was crying and didn’t know what to do. Grown-ups were not supposed to cry. Or maybe they were, but he’d never seen. He watched her until she turned towards him and pulled him into a hug like the one he’d been trying to give her earlier. He could feel the wetness getting through his hair and onto his head and it was uncomfortable because he wasn’t having a bath but it wasn’t like he could do anything, so he hugged back.


	2. Chapter 2

Dad was gone. Mom said that he and Sam didn’t have to go to school either. But Dean didn’t really mind. It was more time that he got to spend with Sammy. They played Cars again and then when Mom said it was okay they ran around in the yard and played other games. Dean saw the driveway after the rain cleared up and the mark on the curb from where Dad had hit it too hard. And even though he didn’t want to he heard Mom cry again, he did. It was through the wall, after he was supposed to be asleep. He thought about how she’d hugged him earlier, but was too afraid to get up. Sometimes it was better to pretend not to notice.

Gabriel came to the house on Sunday. It wasn’t Thursday yet, he wasn’t supposed to be here. It was too early. Mom told Sam and him to go play somewhere else while she talked to Gabe. They both had grown-up faces on, the ones that teachers had when someone had when they talked to parents. The bad look. At first he thought he might be in trouble, but then he realized; they were probably going to take Sam away. He took Sam upstairs and set him up with a coloring book, leaving again to sneak back downstairs. Eavesdropping was kind of exciting, but he made sure not to do it often because one time he’d been seen and that hadn’t been fun. 

By the time he got back down they were already talking serious.

“I don’t know what to do Gabriel. He’s not the kind of Father I want to be around my kids.” Mom’s voice was quiet, he had to really listen. “I was right not to send them to school. He showed up asking to take them out. Gabe, he was going to take them away from me.”

“Mary. It’s okay. It won’t matter for too much longer anyways.” Sometimes Dean forgot that Gabe was an angel. He had ways to comfort Mom that Dean didn’t. Angels made promises.

“When?”

“I can’t say. Soon. He promised.” And then footsteps were happening and he had to move. Spying wasn’t really spying if you got caught.

They didn’t say they were taking Sammy away, but then why else would Gabe be here? That’s all he ever did. Take Sam away. Then they came home and Sam would snap at him, and mope around, and not want to play at anything; like the dog they used to have. Sam doesn’t remember but they’d had a dog back before his baby mind could remember. Quincy liked to run away. And Dad said it was because he was a hunting dog, and that’s why they went on hunting trips a lot. One time he hadn’t brought Quincy home. They hadn’t talked about it, but it had happened. He missed Quincy when Sam was away. He used to lay down with him in the sun and while Quincy thought about dog things Dean thought about what it was like to have an angel. More often than not he had to stop because he was making himself sad, but sometimes he liked to imagine that he was the angel instead. Sammy’s angel maybe. He had wings and he flew everywhere and had lots of fun. He had a magic sword like from the book he’d gotten at the school Book Fair about King Arthur. It killed bad guys and the monsters that Uncle Bobby liked to tell him about when he came over. Once in a dream it had even had flames, so he’d added those too. It was his shield against everything in the shadows. One day he realized that he’d forgotten about it and… well he didn’t know. It was a particularly icky of bad. Like the times Mom caught him filching things from the kitchen that he knew he wasn’t supposed to have. Right now he wished that the sword would make sure Sammy stayed with him and Mom forever, where he belonged. Back upstairs Sam was half done coloring in a Viking ship and wanted to know what the runes on the side of the boat said.

“I don’t know, Sam. Probably a Viking code, you know. One that only Vikings could read.”

There was a knock on the door and Gabe stuck his head in.

Sam broke out into one of the smiles that he only used to have when he saw Dean. Goofy ones over Oreos before bed and on the swing set when Dean pushed him really high. Bright smiles that made his eyes shine like stars Dad had taken them to see once. Way out where it was called a dark-sky preserve, because the sky was neat when there was no light pollution. There were the stars you wished on, and then there were stars that you _wished_ on. Millions of them, shining, just sitting there. Sam had smiled then too. Wistful, like he was remembering. And at the time Dean hadn’t thought that was right, because Sam was younger than him, and not even he had seen the stars. But now he realized that there were places he couldn’t be.

“Gabe!”

“Hey, squirt!” Gabe picked him up and spun around while Sam giggled and tried to bunch up Gabe’s shirt in his hands so he wouldn’t fall. “How you doing, huh kiddo?”

“Coloring Vikings. What does the boat say?” Gabe went where Sam went, like magnets that they sold at the Science Museum.

“Hm. It says ‘On Brave Mountains We Conquer’.” Gabe could even read Viking. No wonder Sam liked him so much. He probably knew tons of stuff that Dean didn’t know. Sam liked people who knew the answers to all his questions.

“See Dean, it’s not Viking code if Gabe can read it.”

He knew he should be mad at Sam, call him stupid and hit him over the head… but all he really felt was sad. 

The three of them trooped back down the stairs and Gabriel scooped Sam up into his arms and plunked his little brother down on his shoulders. Sam looked like he was a million miles away. The light from the hall fixture sent splashes of color across his brother’s cheeks, and he was standing below them just right that it looked like he had a halo. Maybe Sam was really an angel kid. Maybe he really did belong with the stars. Maybe he was really going home.

They were about to leave and Dean still hadn’t said goodbye. Only when Gabe was halfway out the door did he run up, only tall enough to tug on the archangel’s shirt, “Take care of Sammy, okay?”

Gabe didn’t say anything; he just smiled, like it was supposed to make him feel better.

It didn’t.


	3. Meeting Castiel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mom wakes Dean up early, the sun is just peeking up down the street and it’s not until he’s in the car and about to fall asleep again that he realizes it’s so early the streetlights are still on. He wasn’t even sure that anything existed before 7 o’clock, but the world must be pretty old. Old people got up early. The only time he ever got up early was on Church days. Grandpa Sam always tried to get out of it, but Grandma Deanna always helped Dean tie his shoes and find nice socks for Church when they were in town it was always on special days, and that’s what you did on special days. Sam would always fall asleep on him and Mom would get annoyed at both of them, even though it wasn’t his fault that Sam was only a baby and didn’t like that the talking went on forever.
> 
> They must be going to Church.
> 
> He wasn’t wearing socks though. Would God mind if he showed up in pajamas?
> 
> Dean decided that he liked it in the morning. The sky was pink, but not like it was when the sun went down. It was different, but he didn’t know how. That bothered him. It was just a sky. Why did it have so many colors?
> 
> (An excerpt from when I originally tried writing the chapter but ended up ditching it and starting over.)

Without Sam there wasn’t really anything to do. Days were always spent with his brother, making Sam laugh and fixing his toys when they got bent out of shape; but now it was bedtime and Gabe hadn’t brought Sam back. Mom tucked him into bed before the bathwater was even gone from his hair and the lights are off and there’s not a sound. Even the usual chatter from the television is silent, because Dad wasn’t there either.

And it’s boring.

Nothing is making noise.

And the house, being the emptiest it’s been in months, doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. 

Not to mention his head is wet, and that itself isn’t right.

It’s the stars in the sky that eventually put Dean to sleep.

\--_

Dean ends up missing Bring Your Angel to School Day.

He remembers Mom waking him up really early and putting him in the car and that the sun was just peeking up behind them on the freeway. And then he thinks there was a loud noise and some colors and then he wakes up again, only this time he’s not in bed and Mom hasn’t made anything for breakfast. That’s because he’s in the hospital.

His nurse is nice and she’s gentle with his arm which is all different shades of color and doesn’t look very nice. It feels even worse. She says it’s broken. He tries not to complain, it itches.

There’s a man that was there in the beginning, he sat in the corner on a rusty fold out chair with his funny coat and watched Dean for a while, but then he left. When Dean wakes up sometimes there’s a breeze on his face and even though he has no window he’s sure that an angel has been there. Just like Mom said, watching over him while he slept.

Mom comes and visits him sometimes, but she’s in a wheelchair and can’t do it often. But it’s not that she wouldn’t like to, but the nurse says that like his arms she’s got her legs broken in a couple of places. The doctor (which he never sees) doesn’t like her to get out of bed too often. Dean supposes that makes sense. But he doesn’t have to like it.

It’s then that everyone comes back, Dad, Gabe, and Sam. Mom says that she doesn’t want Dad there, but somehow Dad manages to stay anyways. He’s told by both Mom and Gabe not to go anywhere with Dad because they want him to stay where they are. It’s because he’s hurt, but he can walk just fine and doesn’t see what they do. Dad is Dad, he’s always been Dad. Why wouldn’t he go?

And it’s one day when he’s down in the food court and Dad has gotten him some eggs and a biscuit from the line that the man shows up again. Dean can see he’s angry and shies away when he walks over.

“Mary asked you not to take him anywhere. Listen next time.” The man looks mad at Dad, and Dean can see that Dad isn’t fond of the man at all because he says some things and then he says, : “He’s my god damn son and I can take him anywhere I want.” Before Dad is up against the wall and the man is breathing close to his face, sort of like how people do when they’re about to kiss. 

It scares him and he’s confused and Dean starts to cry, right there in the food court where everyone can see him and that makes him cry harder.

And it’s while he’s trying to wipe the tears away that he feels someone else doing it for him. It’s the man, and he’s got really blue eyes, like Dean’s favorite crayon; cerulean. He doesn’t look happy, but at least he isn’t angry. He holds out his hands and Dean runs right in, grasping the collar of his shirt with his grubby little kid hands. He kind of wipes his nose on the man’s tie, because that’s what his nose does when he cries. It gets runny even though he doesn’t have allergies. He hates it.

After he does though he feels bad and tries to wipe it away. It doesn’t work. He feels guilty and cries even harder.

It’s not right because he really has nothing to cry about, but the man just picks him up and says something else to Dad that Dean doesn’t notice in time to catch. Then they leave. The man carries him out of the lunch room and he lets Dean press his floor on the elevator. It lights up and Dean sniffles a bit, still trying not to wipe his nose on the guy but at least he isn’t really crying anymore.

The crying feelings are replaced with happy ones, like how warm the funny coat is. That must be why he wears it. Dean wants one.

Gabriel is there outside the elevator and Dean can tell he’s been worried, like when Mom lost him at the mall once. But he sees Dean and that face falls away and Gabe is back, smiling, he even produces a sucker that he gives to Dean. Its mystery flavor. Dean doesn’t always like those because they’re often the ones he doesn’t like. Root Beer, Cream Soda, or Grape; but sometimes it’s Cotton Candy, and he can dig that.

It’s actually Strawberry. He’s pleasantly surprised.

“Thank God, Cas. Where was he?” Gabe ruffles his hair like Dad used to and that makes him happy too.

“The food court.” And the guy’s name is ‘Cas’. That’s nice. “His Father took him. We should tell security. I’m not dealing with that again. It was… upsetting for everyone involved.”

And Dean feels bad for crying again, but Cas looks back down at him with a sort of half smile so he figures it’s okay. As long as he doesn’t mind.

\--_

On Monday dean goes back to school and Sammy goes back to daycare. Gabriel takes Sam, and Cas takes Dean.

It’s then that Dean realizes that Cas is an angel.

It’s because Cas flies them there, and he’s really fast. It’s almost like a word he saw in a book once, tele something. Like television only it’s not.

“Wait, so you’re an angel, right?”

Mr. Cas crouches so he can set Dean down. “Yes Dean. I am an angel.”

Dean doesn’t know why but he’s disappointed. He still doesn’t have an angel. He’s waited around hoping for one and watching Gabe with Sam but it can’t be too long now. Mom used to say ‘patience grasshopper’ but he still doesn’t know why. What was wrong with grasshoppers?

“I still haven’t met mine. If you see them do you think you can say hi for me?”

And Cas looks startled and looks at Dean different, like he’s trying to figure something out; like Dean missed something. He feels his face grow warm. “What?”

And Cas smiles an actual smile, not like the one at the hospital. He didn’t say something funny did he?

“Dean,” Cas reaches around his middle and swings him around. It’s kind of scary and Dean squeals. “I am your angel.”

And for a moment Dean doesn’t know what to say. Cas has been his angel. He didn’t know. He actually _has_ an angel. But once he realizes that he’s really glad it’s Cas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! That's it!
> 
> I really like this verse though so there will probably be some time stamps added later on.
> 
> Also a bonus:
> 
> And for a moment Dean doesn’t know what to say. Cas has been his angel. He didn’t know. He actually _has_ an angel. But once he realizes that he’s really glad it’s Cas, and says so.
> 
> Cas actually blushes a little bit, which is odd but also flattering because Cas never blushes. Not like he smiles.
> 
> And so maybe he got to bring his angel to school after all, because there are with Cas dropping him off to the teacher and he really doesn’t want Cas to go. Now that he knows about Cas he wants to stay there forever. Cas even looks like he knows. But even once Cas is gone Dean decides it’s time to reach back into his mega big box of crayons and sharpen the cerulean one. He draws Cas’s eyes and signs his name at the bottom.
> 
> Cas is his angel, and he doesn’t think he’s ever going to stop smiling.


End file.
